Gimme shelter

Ruth Capler isnt stuck in a cramped and crummy rental anymore. Too bad hundreds of other poor folks in Springfield cant say the same thing.

Fifty-year-old Ruth Capler recently moved into her first home, on Edwards Street.

Ruth Capler never imagined that she would own a home.

The soft-spoken, stalwart mother raised all six of
her kids in rental apartments across Springfield and, at the age of 50, was
living with two of her grandchildren in a cramped two-bedroom unit on North
Fourth Street. She slept in one bedroom and young cousins Katrina and
Darius shared the other. She dreamed that one day the trio could escape
their tiny quarters, but she didn’t know how to make it happen.

Capler worked three jobs just to pay the rent and to
support her family, cleaning houses, caring for elderly people in
nursing homes, and then staying awake through the night minding
neighborhood children while their parents worked the graveyard shift. She was always on her feet, fighting an uphill battle
to make ends meet.

Her health declined, and she injured her knee on the
job. When the required surgery did little to ease the pain, she was forced
to accept disability paymentsin place of a regular employee’s paycheck. A few
months later, Capler’s already grim situation worsened when she
learned that she had cancer.

But Capler — a fervent churchgoer and a woman
of unwavering faith — fought a three-year battle against the disease
and witnessed what she calls an even greater miracle. One day she got a
phone call from her sister, Patricia Smith, who had seen a TV advertisement
about TSP Hope Inc., a local organization that helps low-income people buy
their first homes.

Ron Fafoglia, executive director of TSP Hope

Capler sought out the organization and, after a year
of attending homebuyer seminars and home-maintenance classes and struggling
to straighten out her credit, her dream finally came true. She moved into a
newly renovated two-story home on Edwards Street in September and waited
anxiously for the New Year’s service at New Jerusalem Church —
for the moment when she could proclaim the good news to her congregation.

“I couldn’t wait for that day,”
Capler says. “I was crying before I even got up there, but they knew
I was just so happy. “When you’re ringing in the New Year, you
need to tell something that God has done for you. That was my speech: just
being blessed for 2008, sitting in a brand-new home that I thought I never
would have.”Capler’s story has a happy ending. But the
struggles she endured for years are familiar to more and more Springfield
families — particularly mothers with children — who find
themselves stuffed into tiny apartments or cohabitating with relatives.
Those who have exhausted other options seek refuge in motels or even
women’s shelters.

A 2005 study by the U.S. Department of Housing and
Urban Development found that 2.32 million households, consisting of
families with children, were either paying more than half of their income
for housing or living in substandard conditions.

Local housing experts say that Springfield is not
immune to the growing problem. The 2006 American Community Survey found
that half of Springfield’s 17,000-plus renters experienced such a
housing-cost burden, spending 30 percent or more of household income on
rent.

Even as several organizations, such as the Abundant
Faith Christian Center and Fifth Street Renaissance, work to house the
capital city’s elderly and disabled, Jackie Newman, executive
director of the Springfield Housing Authority, says that families with
children are falling through the cracks. Her organization alone houses
2,000 families through its Section 8 voucher program and nearly 1,000 more
through its affordable-housing initiative, she says, but hundreds of others
are left waiting.

“Anytime you have 2,000 folks with the vouchers
and a waiting list of 200 to 300 people who still need assistance,”
Newman says, “that tells me that there is still a need for additional
affordable housing in the city of Springfield.”

Getting to the root of the problem, however, is no
easy task.

Newman, who grew up in the heart of east Springfield,
signed on as a receptionist with SHA fresh out of college. In 2005, after
more than 20 years with the organization, she was named the agency’s
executive director, charged with getting as many needy Springfield families
as possible into affordable housing.

Newman oversees SHA’s two chief housing
branches: an affordable-housing program and a Section 8 voucher program. As
part of the affordable-housing program, SHA acts as a landlord, managing
900 units scattered throughout Springfield in five high-rise buildings and
multibedroom-apartment complexes such as Lincolnwood Estates and Brandon
Court. The SHA Section 8 voucher program functions in a
different manner, allowing residents to rent privately owned apartments
from participating landlords. SHA subsidizes the monthly payments through
the vouchers, granting individuals the opportunity to choose where they
will live.

Since January, Newman says, all of SHA’s
vouchers have been assigned. Normally the organization would move 50 to 60
individuals or families off the program’s waiting list each month.At most participants would
wait three months for their new apartments or homes, but that period of
time will now likely increase until additional vouchers are freed up.

The people who request assistance face various
challenges, Newman says, but more often than not they struggle to make rent
payments on limited incomes. She’s seen many who are putting more
than half of their income toward rent and other families who are forced to
double up with othersto afford $700 and $800 payments.

“That’s a lot of money,” she says,
“and when you talk about that and the types of incomes that
individuals are bringing in, it creates a gap.”

Mary Stone, executive director of MERCY Communities,
says her organization partners with Newman and SHA in providing rental
assistance to physically or mentally disabled mothers with children. She
agrees that fair-market rents contribute to their issues with housing
— she’s seen four-bedroom apartments in Springfield going for
$900 a month or more.

“If a mom’s working in the service
industry, or in a job that pays her minimum wage, that’s a
stretch,” Stone says.

But what can be done? The Illinois Housing
Development Authority contends that even though families with children
require larger housing units, most developers do not find these
construction projects economically feasible. To make matters worse, says
agency spokeswoman Deborah Russell, the large-family units that are
available usually come with big price tags.

|The issue is even more complicated for households
headed by single women, which, statistics show, is the fastest-growing
segment of the homeless population. Stone says she believes that this
figure holds up in Springfield. Since MERCY Communities began its
stable-housing program, in 2005, she hasn’t gotten one request for
assistance from a single man with children.

Most women who come to MERCY Communities have tried
to become self-sufficient in the past. Some have been through transitional
living programs but returned to bad habits and bad influences. Others are
caught in what Stone calls “intergenerational cycles of
poverty.”

“They come from families where the mom has been
a single mom who hasn’t been able to model for them
independence,” Stone says. “Sometimes we just keep repeating
these cycles generation after generation.”

Stone says that housing alone is not enough to keep
these women stable — instead, they need positive support systems such
as case management, transportation, help with their kids, and health care.
By providing these services, along with MERCY Communities’ subsidized
Enos Park housing, Stones seeks to break children out of the cycle.

When Ron Fafoglia looks around the Mather Wells
neighborhood — the area bounded by 11th Street, Martin Luther King
Jr. Drive, Capitol Avenue, and Cook Street on Springfield’s east side
— he’s proud of what TSP Hope has accomplished. When the organization began its work, eight years
ago, the area was 89 percent rentals.

Thanks to the construction of 28 new
houses and the rehabbing of countless others, the neighborhood now boasts a
50 percent rental-housing rate. Fafoglia, the organization’s
executive director, says that TSP Hope’s goal has always been to
provide low-income permanent housing in an atmosphere that’s changing
for the better.

Fafoglia points to the age of Springfield housing
stock — particularly on the east side, where many of the older homes
are in the hands of landlords — as part of the predicament. When people come in to see him, he says,
they’re often paying the same amount for an apartment that
they’d be paying for a home or even more. Plus, they’re
spending enormous amounts of money on utility costs because of the
rental’s quality: furnaces are old, air comes through the windows,
and there is no insulation.

Renters themselves are also a factor, Fafoglia adds.
As the number of rental homes in an area increases, crime rates go up and
the neighborhood deteriorates. As more people purchase homes and invest in
an area, he says, crime rates decrease and the neighborhood improves.

But, Fafoglia admits, there’s more to the
affordable-housing problem. From what he’s seen, it’s not that
people don’t want to be homeowners — it’s that they
can’t be homeowners because their credit is in such poor shape. More
than 200 clients have come forward to get their own homes, he says, but it
often takes years to fix some credit situations, and many prospective
homeowners give up.

Fafoglia believes that more people need to be
educated when they’re young about maintaining their credit. An
18-year-old who starts making credit purchases and doesn’t understand
the need to keep up with the payments may end up with ruined credit by the
time he or she is 25. By that point, he says, it’s impossible for the
person to get credit for a car, let alone a home.

“Just finding people who are credit-qualified
is the whole trick, or helping people get credit-qualified —
that’s the job,” Fafoglia says, “so for me it’s not
so much of an affordable-housing crisis as it is a credit
crisis.”Springfield’s affordable-housing organizations
face their own problems, mostly involving funding.

Like many federally
funded programs, SHA has watched its annual budget spiral from $5 million
to a mere $1.6 million over the past few years. As the demand for
affordable housing continues to increase, Newman says, her organization is
forced to do more with less. It’s become ever more difficult to
expand housing options and maintain current housing developments.

“My comment to staff is always that there
are 3,000 families that are counting on us to do the right thing,”
Newman says. “There are 3,000 families that are counting on us to
take the little money that HUD has given us and do the best that we can
with it.”

Newman and her staff have had to get creative.
Instead of taking on comprehensive capital improvements on their
40-year-old high-rises, Newman says, they’ve focused on windows and
doors this year and will tackle other projects, such as roofing and
heating, in coming years. The projects that should only take one or two
years, she adds, will have to be stretched over longer periods.

But in spite of its financial limitations, SHA
continues to make headway. The organization demolished the Major Byrd
Hi-Rise — one of the city’s biggest eyesores — and freed
up space for potential new affordable-housing developments. Newman also
hopes to expand the work started with SHA’s two modern developments,
Madison Park Place and North Park Place,by building 41 more affordable-housing units for rental and
home ownership in the same area.

In addition to seeking out more federal grant funds
and applying for a new state rental-housing subsidy program, Newman says,
SHA is diversifying its income by forming partnerships with other
Springfield organizations with an interest in the affordable-housing issue,
such as the Abundant Faith Christian Center, the Sara Center, and the
IllinoisDepartment
of Children and Family Services.

Newman says a holistic approach is needed to expand
affordable housing in Springfield: “One of the things that I’ve said all
along is that we’re not here to be an island, nor are we here to
always be at the forefront, but we do want to be the spark that gets it
going and ensures that affordable housing continues to happen.”Ruth Capler was crazy about her new home the minute
she walked through the door.

She loved everything about it — the
spacious back yard and sunroom porch that would give her grandchildren more
room to play, the two bedrooms upstairs that were reserved specifically for
Katrina and Darius, and all of the extra space she could use to help expand
her fledgling home-daycare business. Most of all, she loved that
she’d be paying less than $700 a month for the whole deal.

Capler admits that the road to home ownership was not
an easy one, but she says that the ups and downs were worth it. She tells
other people in her situation that all it takes is a little faith and
patience.

“To be honest, I didn’t think I was going
to make it,” Capler says. “You walk in a big old beautiful
house like this and you look around and think, ‘Is this really for
me? And I am going to be able to get this? I don’t have no job, and
I’m just barely making it.’